Jonathan Samuels secures £3.5m from P2P platform for new venture

Jonathan Samuels secures £3.5m from P2P platform for new venture




The founder of Dragonfly Property Finance Jonathan Samuels has secured £3.5m of funding from a peer-to-peer platform for his new venture.

Since leaving Dragonfly just over a year ago, Jonathan has founded Upfront Car Finance, which specialises in vehicle finance for Uber drivers.

UK Bond Network has now provided Upfront Car Finance with £3.5m of funding to help the lender grow and expand quicker.

The funding is available for Upfront to draw down in £500,000 tranches and the first of those has been used to acquire and deploy new Toyota Prius cars for drivers who are licensed by the Public Carriage Office and wish to use the Uber platform.

“UK Bond Network provided a novel finance solution at an important time for our business,” said Jonathan.

“With a driver pipeline greater than cars available, the funding will help us to deploy more vehicles and scale more quickly; UK Bond Network offered what we wanted, with the added benefit of certainty of funding.”

Jonathan launched Upfront after Google Ventures contacted him on behalf of Uber to address the rising churn rate among its UK drivers that was caused by high vehicle rental costs.

“Upfront Car Finance is the sort of business we’re increasingly used to helping – a highly innovative, high potential SME in a growth sector, led by able and well-qualified people such as Jonathan and his team,” said Chris Maule, CEO and founder of UK Bond Network.

“We’re delighted to be assisting Upfront in achieving its growth goals, while providing investors with some much needed yield in the current meagre interest rate environment.”

Upfront provides a flexible and secured car finance product for hybrid vehicles, using Uber earnings data to form a lending decision. 

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